Because we be blind, God hath appointed in the scripture how we should serve him and please him (William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, 181).

[Quoting Tyndale] ‘The greatest cause of which captivity and the decay of the faith, and this blindness wherein we now are, sprang first of allegories. For Origen and the doctors of his time drew all the scripture unto allegories; whose example that came after followed so long, till they at last forgot the order and process of the text, supposing that the Scripture served but to feign allegories upon; insomuch that twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song. Then came our sophisters with their analogical and chopological sense, and with an antitheme of half an inch, out of which some drew a thread nine days long.’

The all-important theology of Paul, to take a most powerful example, had vanished, smothered under tomes of what amounted to free association, and was absolutely not available to the common man (From the “Introduction” in Tyndale’s New Testament (in a modern-spelling edition with introduction by David Daniell), xvii).

The story of Tyndale is part of that of the revival of learning. his exceptional strengths were twofold. First was his good Greek and Hebrews, when such knowledge was not at all common. Indeed, he was a pioneer in the great movement of the translation of texts of all kinds into English throughout the century (From the “Introduction” in Tyndale’s New Testament (in a modern-spelling edition with introduction by David Daniell), xvi).

William Tyndale’s Bible translations have been the best-kept secrets in English Bible history. Many people have heard of Tyndale: very few have read him. Yet no other Englishman – not even Shakespeare – has reached so many. . . . Astonishment is still voiced that the dignitaries who prepared the 1611 Authorised Version for King James spoke so often with one voice – apparently miraculously. Of course they did: the voice (never acknowledged by them) was Tyndale’s. Much of the New Testament in the 1611 Authorised Version (King James Version) came directly from Tyndale, as a glance at Luke 2 or most of Colossians or Revelation 21 will show (From the “Introduction” in Tyndale’s New Testament (in a modern-spelling edition with introduction by David Daniell), vii).

Without exaggeration, the theological prolegomena of the seventeenth-century Protestant scholastics provide a model for the development of a distinctive Protestant but nonetheless universally Christian or catholic theology — a model that Protestant theology today can ignore only at great risk (Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:109).

Briefly, the Protestant scholastics declare two principia theologiae, a principle or foundation of knowing (principium cognoscendi) and a principle or foundation of being (principium essendi). The former is Scripture, the self-revelation of God, and the latter is God himself, the self-existent ground of all finite existence. The first and foremost reason for the inclusion of any doctrine in such a system is the fact of its presence as a place or topic — a locus or topos — in the biblical revelation. Predestination receives considerable attention in the Pauline letters and, consequently, receives considerable attention in the Reformed system. Its presence in the system, moreover, rests on the foundation of the Augustinian tradition antecedent to the Reformation (1:126-127).

True knowledge of God, then, arises not out of fallen human nature but only out of the biblical revelation, and it involves not merely knowing the truth concerning God and Christ as a datum, but also accepting that truth in repentance and faith (Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:103).

The Reformers also provided orthodoxy with fundamental insights into the character and arrangement of theology — namely, the locus method, the notion of a historical series of topics in theology and the sense of a Pauline “order” of movement from the problem of sin to the topics of law, grace, the two testaments, predestination, and the church, this latter model being generally compatible with catechetical patterns and with the historical series running from creation to the eschaton (Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:59).

Already in the Theses Bernenses (1528), in contrast to the Lutheran confessional writings, we find an initial description of Scripture as the Word of God and therefore as the ground of theology and the church, indicating early on the Reformed theology, both in concessions and in more or less systematic works, to begin with a clear enunciation of its principia (Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:54).

The Reformation is incomplete without its confessional and doctrinal codification. What is more, Protestantism could hardly have survived if it had not developed, in the era of orthodoxy, a normative and defensible body of doctrine consisting of a confessional foundation and systematic elaboration (Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:27).

A so-called Christianity proving cold or hostile towards the interests of the life to come has ceased to be Christianity in the historic sense of the word (Geerhardus Vos, Pauline Eschatology, 63).